Tracy Bell’s just killed a werewolf when you wake up, look at your little slice and long for earth, as in home, as in Nebraska, or South Dakota or Kansas, as in corn and beer and roads and reckless boys with gravity knives and stubble the color of winter wheat. Look in on them sometimes; it's slow enough, rough-elbowed on the counter of this revamp roadhouse: bar-rag Winchester, whiskey-shot Winchester; others you catch scent of, their flannel and their rebel and their trouble: Tracy. Life you might have had; night, earth; wolf on your leathers and two months along. It's a daughter. You can almost hear the juke, your mother, your own cocky-kid click, shotgun, walls and ghosts and lip-salt; slowdance- trouble: all the girls who love the boys who get them killed. You’d know.

Charlie

You miss your mother. She's here, but not always, and no-one said it was gonna be a gamer's dream, and you wander, and it isn't that hard to hack this ghost-machine; caped-up cosplay, code, with a haircut-tragedy called Ash. Your heroines. Your queens. Sunshine tiara. Flip-wig-flashcard-pantsuit-paradise. Hard not to go drunk on geek, feet up in the pink of your own hideaway, watch playthroughs of Angel Radio. Oz, sometimes. Holes in the ground. When you pray (because a girl’s gotta) you pray for the girls you left behind—and the boys, and the book, and the books and the beer and the Friday nights when they hunker in: Dean and Sam and the snackage, the sheepish six in its brown paper sack.

Pamela

There's no resentment in heaven. That’s what you said, what you tell yourself. Namaste. And sight’s like a double, charged-up with god-juice. Whatever runs this place. Whatever flips its Zippos for peace, every arena you’ve ever been. Angels don’t bother you, know not to. What does: earth. Great Mother. Hands and hands on backs on breasts. Sex. Dick-carved malachite heavy in hand. Nag Champa. Fine, fine Winchester ass.

Billie

Ain’t no grave. You don't go anywhere. Not when you die like that, when you can't die. They’re awake, brothers in a night of their own, tearing after blood on their own turf, mooning at night in their caves, thinking you’ll never sing to them, not again. You still have a throat, what-death-is-the-mother-of, and you can’t hold down a thing without a body, without a soul, thing could foot its way back to a grave she never had; those are the blues; you’d know. One of these days they’re gonna dig you up whole.